Chants and Cheese

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Who would have figured Gregorian chants would help make spectacular cheese? Apparently these guys discovered it!

Happy Birthday, Sheyl!!!

Today's Lunchtime Birding

Today Ruth and I spotted a beautiful Scarlet Tanager , as identified for us by someone else.

Ruth has suggested the name Roy, but for some reason it just doesn't work for me.

this is funny.

Treadmill Kittens

Solstice Moon

(source)
Tomorrow evening is the solstice moon - one where the moon appears to be gigantic on the horizon. Check out this NASA page that explains some possible theories for this moon illusion.

i posted these...

...on facebook, but i will attempt to stay loyal to the blog and post them here as well.

stories such as this are amazing, but they also break my heart:
http://blog.ted.com/2008/05/unbelievable_ph.php

and, the story she tells in the first two minutes here is amazing, crazy:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/91

Doomsday Watch - stay tuned!

Well, today is supposed to be doomsday, according to the one "expert" I posted about yesterday. I thought perhaps it would be a brilliant idea to keep a blog record of doomsday, at least as long as I have fingers to type and a head on my shoulders to keep observing with (who knows what will be the effects of the horror that will be doomsday).

Some day, some future mutant generation of intelligent cockroaches (the only things likely to survive a doomsday holocaust) may look back at this blog record and say "wow, that is some powerful record keeping of the last day of the world as that strange human population knew it, we should make this blogger famous, posthumously, and perhaps name a national holiday after her."

So here goes.

June 12

10:46 am: world still here, seems to be functioning normally (or as normal as is possible for this wacky wacky world). Note to self: I wonder why he picked this day, it would seem more fitting for it to be tomorrow, Friday the 13th. Oh well, not my place to back-seat organize a doomsday.

11:01 am: Possible portent of the end or is it what will be left of us after the end?



HERE is a depiction of some of our most powerful images in a unique medium.

11:13 am: stumbled across yet another portent of the end:
(source)
A pig that doesn't like to get dirty and will only go in mud with booties on, definitely a sign that the end is near (see video here). Next sign is expected to be snowman found not melting on Caribbean beach.

11:24 pm: still here, no sign of the apocalypse

June 13

10:16 am: well, we have all narrowly escaped yet another doomsday. This day should be a day of rejoicing - I declare today to be known forever more as The Day After The Day We Didn't Die in an Apocalyptic Sized Nuclear Meltdown.

Feel free to abbreviate (TDATDWDDASNM) in your calendars.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die... at least according to this wingnut

Pencil it in your calendars, folks, the doomsday cometh tomorrow, June 12th.

On a totally different note, happy 98th birthday to Jacques Cousteau!

Gotta love newspapers

THIS website has a great collection of odd items from newspapers - from strange police dispatch reports, like the one above, to amusing misprints like the one below of a portable dehumanizer.

are you f%&@ing kidding me!!

Dunkin Donuts is pulling one of its ads featuring Rachael Ray because
"She was wearing a black-and-white checked scarf around her neck that resembled a traditional Arab keffiyeh." and according to a conservative idoit blogger it "evoked extremist videos"

Of course! the second I saw the scarf I thought she was about to run around taking hostages and beheading people. And of course all Arabs are terrorists.

On Failing Successfully

A surprisingly uplifting program on the need to accept failure in order to succeed and innovate Link to transcript/ download audio. A little long to read but quite interesting, did you know that the name WD40 stands for 'water displacement' and the 40 for the fact that it was the 40th formulation that finally worked. I'm a big fan of this podcast Ockham's Razor, though it can be a little off the wall sometimes.

There's a paragraph in this one on the increasing fear and intolerance of failure in scientific institutions due to the competition for funding.

And a couple of quotes that may become a new signature for me...

"Henry Ford put it, 'Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently'."

and "Edison who said, 'I have never failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'"

Now I just have to keep this in mind when everything goes horribly wrong during my experiment tomorrow.

Life imitates Art: X-men edition

A group of African frogs have picked up a trick or two from reading x-men comics - these Wolverine-like frogs have claws that must pierce through the skin on their toes in order to be deployed when threatened. Makes you wonder what other kinds of mutant powers frogs have picked up from comic books - perhaps a frog that can stop a speeding locomotive? Or maybe a mind-reading frog that shoots lasers from its eyes and can call upon weather phenomena to defeat its predators.

Fortune Cookies

XKCD

Music 'can enhance wine taste'

Interesting article on the influence of different music styles on how the tastes of various wines were described. Their music recommendations are 'interesting', I don't think I would choose to play Blondie while drinking Chardonnay.

"Previously, Professor North conducted supermarket research which suggested people were five times more likely to buy French wine than German wine if accordion music was played in the background.

If an oompah band was played, the German product outsold the French by two to one."

Is this why I always end up with Reislings from the wine store? They must play a lot of oompah.

Birding from my office

This lovely fellow (or several like him) has been visiting me for the last week or so. He was nice enough to sit right on the window ledge about 2 feet away while I tried to figure out what he was today. At first I thought goldfinch, but then I found this picture. He seemed quite interested when I was playing the sounds off the All About Birds: Baltimore Oriole" website